Pomeroy Launches Managed Cloud Services For Enterprise Customers

Pomeroy has launched a new suite of managed cloud services, its first metered self-service offerings for customers, according to CEO Chris Froman.

The Hebron, Ky.-based company, No. 45 on last year's VAR 500 list, with $545 million in revenue, developed the services as part of its strategy to increase its services mix to midmarket and enterprise clients, Froman said.

"We've always been a cloud builder with OEM partners like [Hewlett-Packard] and Cisco [Systems], but this announcement takes it another step. We can deliver a full menu of SaaS and IaaS offerings. It made sense to come up with a pay-as-a-service-type offering vs. a fixed fee," Froman said.

Customers can deploy, transition, monitor and manage servers, storage and bandwidth using a customized portal using Pomeroy Managed Cloud Services, paying only for the compute power they use, according to Pomeroy.

"There are cloud providers that don't wrap services around virtualization or desktop as a service or enterprise mobility management. This embodies our value proposition of providing optimized infrastructure," Froman said.

Pomeroy plans to use its own data centers and resources as well as utilize third-party providers in some instances. Froman did not break down who will do what but he said the new offerings can scale to enterprises and offer robust services not found through many channels.

"Very large public cloud providers are focused on small businesses or non-production workloads. We focus on enterprises with production class workloads. Many providers can sell you the compute power, but we also offer that as comprehensive set of services for transitioning applications and data from current on-premise to the cloud. We'll also manage the environment for customers with level two and level three support for infrastructure and applications. We're not just doing provisioning and compute power," Froman said.

While most enterprises have traditionally only allowed functions such as antivirus or e-mail to be hosted in the cloud, Froman said demand for fuller enterprise-wide services is beginning to scale.

"It's coming in phases. Our pipeline for virtual desktop is in the tens of thousands [of seats]. That's an indicator they are embracing private cloud in their infrastructures. We also have [IT asset management] deals in the pipeline to be delivered using a SaaS model. Those are two key indicators that adoption is happening," Froman said. "We still do the majority of business in the traditional deployment approach, on premeise, but we want to be very prepared to give them options."

Four years ago, Pomeroy started to move to the data center and the strategy is working, Froman said, noting that the company's sales increased 22 percent last year and it reported its highest customer satisfaction scores in Pomeroy's 30-year history.

"Our company has flipped from commodity product sales to more advanced technology. We're doing a good job in virtualization and servers and storage and networking. We're also fortifying our managed services capabilities," Froman said. "We still have a long way to go but as more clients adopt cloud it's all taking shape."

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